Sasha Selavie on polysexual poet laureate, Jeremy Reed
Never heard of Jeremy Reed? How is that possible? Without doubt, he’s the most insanely prolific, polysexual poet laureate queer London’s ever been blessed with! Since making his literary debut in the 1970s, Reed has subsequently unleashed a perfect, perversely exquisite storm of transgessive writing, comprising novels, poetry and dazzling music critiques. Obviously totally immune to writer’s block, he has now published over seventy books, with fresh tsunamis of outrage appearing each year. Sure, it’s tempting to imagine Reed as a crazed, sleep-deprived, crystal-meth mainliner with no off switch, but the reality – like Reed’s art – confounds easy clichés.
Like fellow gay maverick Jean Genet, outwardly unremarkable, but gifted with a mind consumed by deliriously visionary takes on homosexuality, Reed effortlessly spins the sordid into the sublime. For Reed, drops of spunk wiped on Y-fronts become gorgeous ropes of clotted pearls, and even the most shit-spattered arsehole is a raw, rectal gateway to a sex-magic Oz!
Still, in person, Reed is endearingly bashful and low-key, his signature beret and black velvet jacket the only conclusive clues to his life-long bohemianism. Almost constantly, he haunts the cafes of Soho, poking for the psychic residue of sexual excess that’s drenched Soho’s streets for centuries. It’s an erotic rocket-fuel that’s fired some of his finest books – Boy Caesar and The Pleasure Chateau– and now, most brilliantly, Darkleaks.
But a word of warning – never, ever expect the dull, sedate or obvious from Reed. Always fabulously on trend with trans-human tales of physical and psychic extremity, Reed’s latest collaboration, with artist Martin Bladh, is a shockingly confrontational masterpiece. Forget prissy, middle-class English poetry – Reed, his foot superglued to a full-on, murderous throttle, unflinchingly examines the debauched, continuing cultural legacy of the Jack the Ripper murders. So no cute, fluffy-bunny tales then, but a storming, take-no-prisoners assault on the persistence of artistic violence in cutting-edge art, music and literature.
Sure, it’s possible to accuse Reed of utter tastelessness – after all, he’s inspired by the agony of butchered women – but then, he’s hardly writing for micro-aggression and trigger-warning queens. Rather, he’s following a twisted, aesthetic trail first pioneered by Thomas de Quincey’s Murder Considered as a Fine Art, which thrillingly, extended artistic appreciation to homicide!
So fittingly, Reed’s technique in Darkleaks – short, jabbing bursts of images – mimics murder with a bladed weapon as a metaphor for savage male sexual penetration. And further – in cascades of appallingly gorgeous association – Reed links killing sexual frenzy with the extreme gay sex once practiced in NYC’s Toilet, Anvil and Mineshaft clubs. It’s a startling shadow world undreamt of by heterosexuals, and, both rationally and emotionally, makes a hugely uncomfortable reading experience for even the most sympathetic readers.
Well, so it should – art that’s completely incapable of provoking debate deserves instant death by deletion! Who needs the bland, Xanax complacency of adult novels barely touching Harry Potter literacy lionised as Oprah’s books of the month? Instead, Reed – superbly complemented by artist Bladh’s visceral, cut-up collages – portrays a still-continuing world of unrestrained, chemsex mavericks all obliquely tinged by the Ripper’s demented carnage.
It’s a stunning parade of an alternate sexual history including Victorian drag king Vesta Tilley, the artist Francis Bacon, and, most vividly, Andy Warhol. Arguably, the Warhol passages are the finest in the book, written from Warhol’s would-be assassin Valerie Solanis’s point of view. It’s here that Reed best achieves a jaw-dropping, artistic empathy with his material, continuing the theme of psychotic transformation – humans rendered into meat and objects – running throughout Darkleaks.
‘White-gloved aristos fucking boys’ Reed writes, irrefutably indicting the vicious, exploitative predation of the unfortunate by the entitled, a process still happening socially today with austerity. Yes, Reed’s deploying a controversial lens for his magisterial exposé of unhinged, artistic expression, but he’s doing it with an incredible, sexually deviant finesse. Our verdict? Unmissable!
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